The invention is a system, method and software program for automatically extracting content for integration with electronic mail. Depending on the needs of the user, the invention may be implemented by installing the Wrapmail application on a server located on an internal network, having a third party host the Wrapmail application on a server located on an external network, or by accessing the Wrapmail application on the Internet where it may be embodied as a web application.
The Internet has become the dominant medium for communicating, distributing and publishing ideas. Commercial use is also widespread. A company may use the Internet to offer services, sell products, provide support and advertise on a global scale. Today, many successful companies use the Internet as the primary medium for conducting business. To draw visitors or potential customers, websites are designed with rich images, logos, and other media. Although the interconnectivity of the Internet makes publication and distribution of website content to a very broad audience easy, communicating the same content directly with potential customers on a personal level remains difficult.
Using a website to communicate with the market is critical to a company's success. The website provides a place where customers can read about and see the products offered. Most companies expend a great deal of money to build their website, to promote products as well as build identifiable brands. Thus, integration of brand identity in a company's Internet presence is an important component of the company's overall marketing strategy. The passive nature of websites, requiring users to point their browsers to the URL of a company's home page, makes it difficult for a company to insure that all of their customers are informed about their sales and promotions.
Websites may be composed with a combination of technologies. HyperText Markup Language (HTML) is a markup language designed for the creation of web pages with hypertext and other information. HTML is used to structure information—denoting certain text as headings, paragraphs, lists, the placement of images and so on—and can be used to describe, to some degree, the appearance and semantics of a document. While some e-mail clients allow a sender to compose e-mail with HTML, learning HTML and creating HTML e-mail templates requires a serious investment on the part of the sender.
To address the passive nature of websites, many companies use RSS feeds. RSS is a simple XML-based system that allows users to subscribe to their favorite websites. By using RSS, a webmaster can put their content into a standardized format, which can be viewed and organized through RSS-aware software, usually an aggregator. While RSS may assist syndicating the text in a website, it has not succeeded in syndicating rich multimedia. In addition, RSS requires a person to subscribe in order to receive the syndicated information. While this may partially solve a problem with one-to-many communications; it does not solve the person-to-person communication issue.
Electronic mail is the medium of choice for communicating information from one person to another. Today, people generally send e-mail with two similar technologies. They may use an e-mail client, which is an application residing on the hard drive of the computer. An e-mail client, also called a mail user agent (MUA), is a computer program that is used to read and send e-mail. Popular e-mail clients include Outlook, Eudora, Thunderbird and Apple Mail.
The second option is webmail. Webmail is an application residing on a remote server on the Internet. This web application allows users to access their e-mail through a web browser. Popular webmail providers include Hotmail, Yahoo! and Gmail. Other webmail providers include AIM Mail, Mail.com, Fastmail, Lycos Mail and Excite Mail. It is also possible to run webmail software on one's own web server. Commercial webmail software solutions such as Outlook Web Access (OWA) are also available. In addition, some cellular phones may provide limited e-mail functionality.
While most e-mail applications allow a user to format their e-mails with HTML tags, it is not easy to distribute content as rich as the content on a website. E-mail clients require the installation of a piece of software on every user's computer. Webmail services do not allow a user to easily edit mails they are working on offline. Commercial webmail services often offer only limited e-mail storage space and either display advertisements during use or append them to e-mails sent. Unlike an e-mail client user, the webmail user cannot access their e-mail from his or her local hard drive.
In a typical computer network system such as a local-area network (LAN), wide-area network (WAN), and the Internet and the World Wide Web (WWW), e-mail applications are often utilized to compose and transmit written and graphical communications between two or more users of the network. Each user has a unique network address that may be used for routing and identifying purposes in delivering an e-mail from one user (sender) to another user (recipient). E-mail is typically sent by an e-mail client such as Microsoft Outlook and received by a server for processing outbound and inbound e-mail, such as a SMTP server, POP3/IMAP server, or another server in communication with the SMTP server, POP3/IMAP server, or both.
Most e-mails are relatively brief, containing only a small amount of text. For larger e-mails, an attachment feature of the e-mail application may be used, whereby the larger document is electronically transmitted by attachment, thus preserving the original formatting of the document. With attachments, ordinarily, no formatting is lost. Yet, attachments require the recipient to open the attachment in order to convey the intended message. Furthermore, these attachments are often used as a medium to send a computer virus to other computers. Highly targeted and personalized e-mail sent with rich dynamic content presents a new opportunity for companies to brand and promote their business online.
Communication via the Internet and WWW is a staple of business correspondence, advertising and promotion, as well as sales. A company website, usually accessible through a URL to a designated “home page”, provides an electronic gateway to company information, products and services. Most companies expend a great deal of money and time to build their websites, to promote the desired image as well as build identifiable brands. Integration of brand identity in a company's web presence is an important component of the company's overall marketing strategy.
At present, most websites are composed in one or more hyper text markup language (HTML) formats, (or eXtensible markup language (XML) format), which allow the inclusion of text and graphics, including scanned images, in web pages. The functionality of HTML formats allows companies to build sophisticated websites incorporating their brands, trade and service marks, and one or more themes that enhance and distinguish the company's image.
Repeated, uniform use of a company's trade and service marks builds goodwill in the brand (the source of the goods and services), and can be an important asset to the company. To enhance brand value and distinguish a company's products and services from those of its competition, a company's marketing departments, often with the supervision of the trademark design and creation and legal protection personnel, oversee the production and quality control of business cards, letterhead, invoices, labels, packaging, signage, and web pages. Consistency and uniformity are critical in establishing and maintaining a strong brand.
E-mail has long been underutilized as a tool for consistent use of a company's branding components and trademarks. Although most e-mail applications allow composition and display of HTML formats, it is not practical to custom-design HTML e-mail formats with scanned inputs and graphical images, as this would defeat the time-efficient use of e-mail. A further problem is that such design would necessarily be stored locally.
An attempt to address such deficiencies is found in the invention of U.S. Pat. No. 6,446,115 to Powers. Powers discloses a system and method for generation, graphical composition, and delivery (or routing for delivery) of conventional forms of written correspondence, with security against forgery. The method of Powers requires extra steps for each user to employ the system. There is no enforced uniformity of messages, and no suggestion of extracting the company's web site content to wrap an e-mail message.
Other attempts to address this problem require a significant change to the software and hardware framework. For example, in United States Patent Application, Pub. No. US 2005/0027781 A1, published on Feb. 3, 2005 to Curry et al., the application requires the tight integration of the e-mail formatter program with post-office properties of the mail server to format outgoing messages. Most importantly, Curry et al. requires every employee to install new e-mail client software forcing end users to switch from their current clients and learn a new one.
The transaction costs involved with switching software, especially with an application as critical as e-mail, should raise many concerns. First, the user must learn an entirely new interface. Second, importing and exporting contacts in an address book may cause problems. Third, many e-mail applications have built-in calendars that users rely on significantly. Here, the invention removes those constraints with options that include internal hosting, as well as external hosting of the SMTP server. In addition, the present invention teaches a pure web based version of the application. Curry et al. teaches away from an implementation involving external hosting, and provides no suggestion of a pure back end solution, and no suggestion of dynamically extracting content from various sources to leverage investment in a website.